by Amy Faye
"You saved my life," Sarah cried, the weight of what had happened finally dawning on her. It was too much for her to think about all at once. How was she going to be alright? What the hell had attacked her? How was any of this possible?
"Do you need us to walk you home? We need to talk."
Sarah couldn't speak. It was all too much. She nodded her head and tried to gulp down a breath.
The second man, the man whose intensity had overwhelmed her so completely, turned the moment her head started to move. He stalked ahead, and she watched the way that his hips moved as he walked. Even in heavy autumn clothing he looked she could see the way that he moved, could see how naturally and how comfortably every step was.
He looked as if he were more in tune with his body than she would ever be, Sarah thought. The way that he slunk up to corners, peered around them, his body tensed up like a snake coiling to strike. The easy movement from left to right of his head, never surprised. She and his partner took up the rear, his arm around her shoulders.
She didn't even know their names, she realized, as they turned and finally came out near the front door of her apartment. She walked past the doorman, never thinking about how the three of them might look to an outsider. She wasn't thinking about much of anything except getting back to her apartment. Where it was safe.
As soon as she got back, all of this would be a bad dream. All of it, she hoped, except for these two.
Sarah's mind barely registered when they got into her apartment and laid her down on the sofa. The dark-haired one paced back and forth, something clearly upsetting him. The one with blue eyes, on the other hand, after all his interest in whether or not she was alright, seemed ready to go immediately.
"Introductions," said the dark-haired, intense man after a long moment of thought. "My name is Isaiah, this is my partner, Jason. Do you know what just happened to you?"
"Those men, they tried to attack me. I could've been… or worse."
"Those weren't men," Jason corrected immediately. "And not just because 'real men don't attack women.'" He seemed to silently laugh at his own crude joke.
"Those were ghouls. The soul of a vampire—"
"Wait, what?" Sarah sat up. "Vampire? You're pulling my leg. Is someone going to pop out with a camera? Did Lana put you up to this?"
"It's not a joke, miss Lincoln. I'm afraid it's very serious. You were attacked by the servants of a vampire tonight, who intended to bring you, sedated, to his lair, where he would then brutally murder you for his own pleasure and drink your blood"
"That's very dramatic," she said, still half-teasing. It sounded like he was serious, but what Isaiah said was insane. Eventually, she knew, shed figure out what the real game was and then she'd understand whether or not he was serious. Until then, she just had to humor him.
Isaiah crouched down before her. Now that he was this close, it was a wonder that she'd ever laughed at him. He didn't look like the sort of man that women laughed at. He was handsome, to say the least, but more than that, she was immediately reminded of how his gaze seemed to pierce straight through her.
As if he could see inside her, could see the fear, and see how she doubted him.
"It is dramatic," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "It's dramatic and unpleasant and my associate and I have seen more than one woman like yourself end up dead by the end of the night when they ignored our advice."
"They probably deserved it, though, to be fair," piped up the other. "They didn't listen to the experts, they ignored the signs… You look like a smart girl, though. I'm sure you can figure it out for yourself. Let's go, Isaiah. She doesn't want us here, it's not our place to stay and force her to believe us."
He shot that same intense stare at Jason. The smaller man scowled back, clearly frustrated by something.
"So you and your friend hunt… monsters?"
"Vampires. We're very specialized. It's too easy to get in over your head when you start going after anything you can find. Much easier to know what you're up against."
"And… do you? Know what you're up against?"
"We know who's after you, and we know that you don't want to have someone like that taking a special interest," he said softly.
"Do you know a Victor Reagan?" Jason's voice was lower, now.
"The guy from TV?"
"Not exactly." Jason moved behind the couch, and Sarah was acutely aware of how close the two of them were. How it made her body feel. "He controls half the channels on the air right now. Along with two other men, the three of them make up almost any news or entertainment you can get in the city. Or most other cities, for that matter."
"What does he want with me, though? Couldn't he have anyone he wanted come to him, with an engraved invitation?"
"What does any man want with a woman?" Jason's voice was closer, now, and she could feel his breath against her neck.
Sarah shivered. She didn't want to lean away from him, though it came naturally to her. She wanted… it didn't matter what she wanted.
"Okay, so let's pretend I believe you. What's next?"
"Well, we have to eat, of course." The joke was inappropriate, Sarah thought. All this talk of vampires, and now talk of… 'eating?' "We have a usual feel, about a thousand dollars."
Sarah's eyes widened. She didn't care who saw. She turned around to face him, looking for a sign that Jason was kidding when he'd thrown out the number. For once, his face seemed serious, past the emotions and past the jokes.
"I don't have—"
"No, they usually don't. Of course, we don't usually help people who can't afford the help. Do we, Isaiah?"
The question was pointed and, Sarah realized, angry. Why would he go out of his way for her? That was… absolutely crazy, she thought.
Isaiah's lips pursed together and he looked up at Jason with those hot-coal eyes. If he'd looked at her like that, Sarah might have caught on fire.
"If we're not getting paid for this gig, I'm leaving," said the voice behind her. She and Isaiah watched Jason walk away. When he got to the door, Isaiah started to rise, as well.
"If he goes…" He started towards the door. "I guess I go."
"Wait," she said, the words catching in her throat. "What if I could pay you both back somehow?"
"Like what? I don't take loans. The business doesn't see us coming back to the same place that often, after all. It's dangerous to stay in one place too long. The wrong sort of people catch on to what you're doing. And I don't need to have any books shelved."
She got up and wrapped her arms around his thick chest. He was big, she realized. He seemed proportional, and she'd only seen him standing relatively far away, but this close, the two of them together, he must have been a foot and a half taller than her.
"I could pay you with… you know. I could show you both a good time."
Isaiah turned, his hands on her shoulders, his eyes staring into hers. It was hard not to look away. Whatever it was that drove him, whatever it was that made him the person he was, he had more of it than anyone she'd ever known.
His eyes were already burning into her, looking deep inside. What did he see? His lips pursed, and then he leaned in and claimed a kiss from her lips before she had a chance to react.
His kiss was like a drug, sending her mind into overdrive.
"Fine," he growled as he pulled away. "I'll take the job."
Sarah pressed her body into him, feeling his hard muscles through his clothes, feeling it press back against her own soft form. She pushed back against him when his hand came up to squeeze her ass.
"Don't you need to go talk to Jason?"
He kissed her again in response, his hands not resting as he explored her body. Sarah's skin lit up in her mind, sending sharp signals of pleasure wherever he touched.
She was just paying for his services. Paying for the safety that only he could provide, the only way that she knew how. She wouldn't admit that it was pleasure, that she wanted it as much as he.
His kis
s grazed her neck, a soft brush, and then it was gone, and his mouth had moved lower, kissing her exposed collar bone, kissing down the low neck of her shirt. He exposed one of her breasts and claimed it in his mouth, the heat and the sharp, electric pleasure mixing and merging and driving Sarah mad.
This was nothing like the last time she'd been with a man. He had left her bored and she'd let herself believe that it was no better than spending quality time with a dirty book and a vibrator.
This was something more, something that got deep into her mind and twisted her core, tying knots in her stomach that she wanted nothing more than to let him undo.
"I…" He let out a long breath and stepped back. "Now isn't the right time. We've got—"
He stopped when they heard footsteps coming up to the door, pounding the ground hard, like someone running. The door burst open a split-second later.
"We've got trouble." Jason looked more serious than she'd ever seen him. Whatever 'trouble' meant, she didn't want to have to find out if it scared a monster hunter this much.
She only heard the sirens a moment later, only registered their meaning a moment after that. What did the police want with her apartment? It was only when a loudspeaker came on instructing her to come out with her both her hands visible that she realized. They were here for her.
Why were the police here for her? She hadn't done anything wrong. Even with the strange men that they'd left behind in the alley, she hadn't done anything. It had all been the two men in the room with her now. A voice pulled her out of her stupor. A voice she didn't recognize until later.
"You have one chance to escape, Miss Lincoln. You can come with me, and your friends here will be spared, or you can resist, and they'll both be dead before they hit the ground."
She turned to face the speaker. He was in her bedroom, stepping out of the deep shadows and into the main room where the overhead light provided dim illumination. A well-dressed man, a man who looked as if he came from not-inconsiderable wealth.
How had he gotten in? There was no ground access to the fire escape outside her window, and he wasn't wearing a policeman's uniform.
"Come with me, and I promise, everything will be fine."
She heard the words come out of his mouth and realized with a jolt that he was right. There was nothing that she could do, but if she went with him—surely Isaiah and Jason had been wrong. Whatever the situation was, he certainly wasn't a vampire. He wasn't going to hurt her.
The hand around her arm, yanking her away, brought her suddenly to the realization that she'd already started moving towards him. Jason's hand was tight, like a vice, and he pulled her along behind. The well-dressed mystery man moved to follow with surprising speed, but Isaiah took a long step and stood in his way.
"You'll leave her be," he growled. Was that a note of… protectiveness?
Sarah's heart fluttered. Why was he risking his neck for her? Why, when the man had promised not to hurt her if she came quietly? When he'd promised that Isaiah and his partner could get away safely before their identities were revealed?
The knife flashed again in Isaiah's hand, his hand moving as quick as thought towards the mystery man's chest. The other man's hand shot up and grabbed the blade, twisting it out of Isaiah's hand before he could do anything to stop it.
"Now, that could hurt someone."
The smell of cooked meat, like sizzling bacon, filled the room, just enough that Sarah noticed it before Jason kicked through the door and pulled her along with him. They wouldn't have much of a head start, she thought. Not if Isaiah didn't hold the other man off for a very long time.
Now that she was out of the room, into the cold night, she realized what had just happened. That, she realized, wasn't any normal man. He wasn't a ghoul, either.
That had been Victor Reagan. She'd seen him on TV once, years ago. He'd looked no different then than he did now.
He was a vampire, she knew with a startling certainty. He'd been faster than anyone she'd ever seen, and from the way that he'd torn the knife from Isaiah's hand she knew he must have been very strong.
He was built to hunt and eat humans, an apex predator that was supposed to be nearly unkillable.
And she and Jason had just left Isaiah alone with him to die.
2
"He's a big boy, he can take care of himself."
Jason's voice was hard and icy, as if he didn't have any feelings at all about the partner they'd both left behind. Once they'd hit the ground, he'd thrown Sarah over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and she was still trying to wriggle out of his grasp. She only stopped when he finally put her down in a large room that looked for all the world like an abandoned warehouse.
He was breathing hard, but that didn't stop him from grabbing her before she could make it to the door when she immediately bolted. He turned her over easily and his hand came down in a hard slap on Sarah's bottom. The sting sent a shock through her entire body, leaving behind a pleasant buzz between her thighs.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
She didn't see his face when she spoke, but she did feel the second hard swat that came down.
"You think that he'd want you to go get yourself killed? Over what? Over nothing. We wait here. Once the smoke has cleared a little, and once we have looked into why this bloodsucking piece of shit is so interested in you, then we can start thinking about what to do next. Stop acting like a child."
The hard edge to his voice was strange. She'd only been with the pair of them for an hour or so, but she hadn't seen Jason show much in the way of emotion. He was too distant, too sarcastic. Now he seemed angry with her, when all she did was try to see if she could do anything for Isaiah.
"What's your problem?"
"What's my problem?" He exploded in anger. "I have to sit here, babysitting you, instead of doing my job. There's no way that Victor should have come after you again. It makes no sense at all, so until we can figure out what makes you so fucking special, I can't go help my partner!"
He took a deep breath and finally let up just enough for Sarah to wriggle her way off of his lap. She thought about making another run for it. He seemed to have calmed down enough that maybe he thought she'd learned her lesson. If he thought that, then maybe he'd let her slip past.
He seemed to know what she was thinking, though, and shot her a look that said all he needed to say, so she leaned back against a steel girder and watched him. It didn't take long before his expression shifted back to its usual disinterest.
Sarah couldn't catch her breath. "Why is this happening to me?"
"Because after thousands of years roaming the earth, Victor Reagan thought you had a great rack," came Jason's reply. It had an edge of bitterness to it, but the sad smile the stretched across his face seemed to be almost laughing at his own joke, whether it was funny or not. "I don't know. I would like to go find out, but I've never had a vampire follow a girl like that. You ever been fishing? Usually once the fish figures out that there's a hook behind the bait, they leave it alone. Once we show up, it's game over, and they stop for a few days at least. Long enough for us to pick up a new lead."
"Then why did you come after me so soon? You could have had him, from the sound of things, if you'd just followed those weird guys back to wherever they were going."
He looked as if he wanted to say something but thought better of it. "Well that's not what we did," he growled. "Are you complaining?"
The breaths that she hadn't been able to take finally came, and she gulped them down hungrily.
"Cut that out. You're going to give yourself—"
The world started to go black and Sarah was just conscious enough to feel herself slipping away from the girder and to the floor. She tried to brace for the impact that she knew was coming, but her body wouldn't move. She couldn't stop herself from falling.
She never hit the ground. Something caught her on the way down.
"I tried to tell you," said James's voice. He was close to her, too close. She cou
ld feel his body, could feel the heat of his touch. She could almost reach out and just… her fingers traced the lines of her face as her vision slowly started to return.
"I fell," she said dumbly. The world seemed to come back at the same time as her memories and she realized what had happened for the past hour. "Jesus! What if Isaiah couldn't get away somehow? What if he's—oh God, it's all my fault."
James kissed her and the panic that had been setting in again slipped away. The only thing that she could think of was how much she wanted—she couldn't put her finger on it. Sex, but something more. Something she knew that he could give her.
She pulled away. "James…"
He leaned back in hungrily kissing her, and then whatever she had been about to say was gone. She let him pick her up, his kisses tracing a line along her collar bone, suckling gently and sending sweet pleasure across her skin. This was the second time that night.
Sarah had no idea what was going on. She'd been alone for years, ignored by nearly everyone except her co-workers. They'd learned not to ask her to come out with them, too, realized a long time ago that she wasn't that sort of girl. She was the kind who went straight home after the library closed, except for the rare occasions that she had a book club or went to the movies.
Now two of the most gorgeous men she'd ever seen were both kissing her, making her feel things that before she'd only thought existed in stories. Whatever was going on, she wasn't sure whether or not she wanted it to stop.
She pushed him away, tried to clear her mind. All she could think, all she knew, was that that afternoon she'd never have believed that vampires existed, not if both of these men had insisted upon it to her face.
Now she was completely certain that she'd just sent a man to his death to face one. More than that, she wanted to go after him, to save him if she could. It had been a long time, nearly twenty minutes now, but if she was lucky then she could almost make it.
James seemed to sense what she was thinking, his arms tightening around her before she could begin to squirm, quashing any rebellion before it began. The weight of what had happened hit her again, square in the chest. What the fuck was going on? How could she stop it? How could anyone?
